In cellular communications, for example wireless cellular communications, a user terminal may access various services through a signaling chain that traverses at least some of a base station, a base station controller, at least one core network node and at least one border gateway. In some networks, the network is configured to cause user traffic to bypass at least one of the nodes mentioned above. Such a bypass configuration may be termed offloading, whereby a user terminal may obtain services through a signaling chain that doesn't traverse a core network, for example.
Core network offloading has been discussed in the context of the third generation partnership project, 3GPP, because traffic loads are increasing concomitant with the growth of mobile device usage and proliferation of bandwidth consuming applications. Compared with conventional long term evolution/long term evolution-advanced, LTE/LTE-A, solutions such as femto cells or pico cells, long term evolution-local area network, LTE-LAN, is expected to be deployed eventually, for example, on licensed spectrum, on shared spectrum, for example, authorized shared access, ASA, on white spaces spectrum, or on unlicensed spectrum. LTE-LAN is a cellular technology based local area network, where cellular technology is one of LTE, LTE-A, high-speed packet access, HSPA, and the like. For any kind of spectrum used locally, LTE-LAN is expected to offload large volumes of traffic from macro cells and operator's core networks to a local area network.